37 Horrifying Restaurant Stories Shared By Health Inspectors

To make you feel better, I used to worked at Costco and the place was really clean.
The ice cream machine was dismantled and cleaned at least every week (it took 2 hours each time). The fryer emptied and clean everyday. In the food court, we would spend hours on cleaning alone.

The meat department was hose downed with disinfectant and scrubbed every day. Someone was hired just to clean the bakery department during the evening.
The health inspector was seen shopping there a couple of times which I think was good news.

I may not have a great experience working there but I know it's clean.

Was a tradesman working on a hotel in Lower B******k a fine city in Alberta. The reason I was working on it was because a new owner was renovating/updating the hotel. Their restaurant had a salad bar. Every single member of the kitchen staff got fired when the new owner discovered that the salad bar hadn't been cleaned/sterilized in months; they just kept adding more food on top of the old stuff.

Walked into a Mexican restaurant one time and saw some lady soaking some tripe in a mop sink. Saw that and told them to throw all of it in the dumpster and bleach it in front of me. My boss had seen a restaurant defrosting raw shrimp in a mop sink with the mop draped over the faucet.

My other co-worker had to work a foul odor complaint where this Chinese buffet was closed for about a week without utilities. He walked in and found the food was still in the buffet line. He said the stench was so rotten that he immediately threw up upon opening the door. The food was stewing in it's juices for a week in the Texas summer heat. Those are the worst ones that I can think of atm.

Former health inspector here (and current third party food safety auditor): A few things that come to mind:

1. Grocery store so infested with rodents that an entire group of them was living in the dairy cooler- you know there had to be a lot of them in the store if some were resorting to living in a cold room.

2. Chinese restaurant getting ready to open for lunch. I walked in and temped the items in the walk-in cooler- all were well above acceptable temperatures- cooler had broken down in the night and was no longer functioning. They wanted to serve the food anyway. I had to embargo the entire cooler worth of food and stood there as they filled trash bag after trash bag with meat and took it to the dumpster. As I was leaving the location, I drove around to the back and they had employees pulling it all out of the trash and dragging it back into the building. Had to stop them, make them return it to the dumpster and pour straight bleach all over the food to ensure it could not be used.

3. Restaurant so infested with cockroaches that when the manager greeted me at the host stand to take me to the kitchen, he had a roach crawl across his back right in front of me.

4. Observed people smoking in the kitchens and in meat departments of grocery stores. Also observed folks using chewing tobacco and keeping their spit cups on the food prep surfaces.

Most of the stuff we think is disgusting isn't necessarily what the general public would even notice. A lot revolves around handwashing- if you really watch someone during food production and see all the things they touch and then attempt to handle ready to eat foods, it's disgusting. People just don't even think about handwashing like they should.

Just to make everyone feel a little better: I used to work in McDonald's and it was pretty spotless.

Not an inspector but witnessed something gross.

I worked for a company that had a lunchroom with an older woman who cooked our breakfast and lunch. I think she was friends of the owners. She would bring in a daily special, like chili, but also made sandwiches and whatnot.

We had out-of-town customers and when lunch time came around, the secretaries would set up lunch in a conference room by the lunch room, and the lady would make something special just for them.

So I'm taking away plates after these people had eaten and bringing them to the lunchroom for lunch lady to load dishwasher. Now, not everyone had finished their meals. It was chicken and rice this day. It was rather late and an employee had come in asking her to make him something. Im going back n forth doing my thing and I see her scrape the left over food back into the pot. From several plates. I couldn't beleive my eyes so I just stare with question marks floating over my head. Then I hear her ask the guy (who was reading something, so not looking at her) if he wants chicken and rice. (?!) He says "Sure" and she makes him a plate, of left-over food she scrapes off the plates I gave her. I should have said something, but I noped out of there real quick.

It bothered the heck out of me so I confessed to a co-worker and she's all "You have to tell the boss!". I did, it escalated to the owners, and lunch lady was fired.

A friend of mine is director of health in a small Massachusetts city. He explains that cultural differences can play a big part in restaurant food handling practices. He's seen just off the boat Chinese workers drop loads of cooked rice on the floor and pick it up in front of him, intending to still use it. These people he interacts with come from very poor areas and the thought of throwing out that rice would seem absurd.

Okay okay finally I have a story! I got this!

I worked as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant owners and staffs are all chinese. The place is actually pretty clean and well run, and then one day....

A regular came in with a bad cold. Order a large pho and our popular whole coconut juice (make a hole in the coconut and stick a straw in it). Anyone who had drink hot soup while sick would know that you produced a lot of mucus right after... of which the dude spitted into the coconut.

I cleaned the table and tossed the coconut into the trash bin along with his other mucus covered paper napkins, food bits from other tables, etc. About 5 minutes later, another waitress came by and fished it out of the garbage bin, put it on the dirty dish cart inside the soup filled dish tray. I asked what she is doing, and she just laughed awkwardly and walked away.

I was curious enough to keep an eye on the coconuts. The dishwasher was the father of the manager of the restaurant. He came by, cut the coconut open with the cleaver (same one that is used to cut open fresh coconut, cut meat, etc), washed the coconut with water and scraped the mucus out with his bare hands. Took a spoon, scrape out the coconut meat that lines the coconut, wrapped it up with cling wrap, and placed it inside the little fridge below the smoothie station.

The meat then was used to make the popular coconut smoothie. I confronted the old man about it, who got really indignant and demand that I made a coconut smoothie with coconut from that batch (a coconut batch can make three smoothie). Then he drank it right in front of me. “See, totally no problem”.

I quit soon after but I also never saw the old man washed his hands.

I've got quite a few. Mexican restaurants, Chinese, and Italian restaurants are typically the most egregious offenders. Which [is bad], because their food is usually the most delicious... As long as you're okay with potentially passing away later from it.

I've only ever closed down one restaurant. It's actually much harder in most places than you would imagine: lots of red tape that prevent field staff, and even managers, from using their professional judgment in the service of public health.

A pizza place was operating without a permit at one point in time. I had drafted a letter stating that, and before I went out to hand-deliver it, I got a complaint notification. Someone had eaten their pizza the day before, and their son had felt glass (or something that felt like pulverized glass) in his pizza. Backing up for a moment to the red tape thing: we're not legally allowed to investigate or inspect restaurants who don't have a permit (you can thank the U.S. Constitution for that). You can see the dilemma. We decide the best course of action is to deliver the letter saying they're operating illegally, and that it would be in the best interest of their business and the public health to allow us to investigate the nature of the complaint.

After I get permission to go in and take a look around, I'm appalled: the manager has fingernails that extend probably half an inch beyond the nail bed. And they're caked in flour and other ingredients. The other employee there has dirty bandages all over his fingers. Both of these characters are dressed in filthy uniforms. The walk-in cooler has loads of uncovered foods sitting beneath stalagtites of mold, all beneath a ceiling of black filamentous fungi. The pizza-prep table has broken doors/hinges, and is covered with what I can only describe as putrified ingredients from 2003. It clearly hasn't been cleaned since then. The plastic lexan containers holding the food items in the cooler are all breaking apart and chipping... At this point, I've got a few ideas as to what that guy found in his pizza, and I don't think any of them are glass. It's probably a fingernail, or a bandaid, or plastic, or maybe broken metal from the cooler itself...

Then I see it... The most disgusting can opener I've ever seen. To put it in perspective, mounted can openers are like the low hanging fruit of every health inspector: they're almost always out of compliance, and writing one up will make you look like a Try-Hard jerk who's out to get the restaurant owner in trouble. They're usually not a big deal. Except this one. This one is absolutely caked in dried, vile, pizza sauce goop that has turned black with age. The blade itself is so dull and chipped it is literally peeling metal filaments off into a mass next to the blade. Every time this thing is used to open a new pizza sauce (which, by the way, is put into a cracked plastic container and covered with a trashbag to keep the loads of flies away) it deposits metal chips, flakes, filaments, whatever you wanna call it, into that sauce, and into the bellies of the customers.

Needless to say, I was appalled. I had the person in charge call the store owner, who pleaded with me to let him stay open. Given that they didn't even have a permit to be open in the first place, this was a no-go. I went back the next day with back-up, and we formally closed them for operation until they could get everything back into working order. Surprise surprise, they call the next day saying everything is fixed, and... I can't believe it, but it was. Managerial lack of control aside, they must have spent a thousand dollars and 16 hours into cleaning this place. The one dude even clipped his fingernails!

Success story? Maybe. Gross example of what you get with second-rate poorly managed restaurants? Definitely. They're lucky no one has yet died from eating there.

Not a health inspector but when I worked at subway we caught a co-worker doing something inappropriate.

My manager had to look at the camera for some unrelated reason. He is skipping forward and accidentally goes to far forward. He notices a worker putting a bin of tuna on the floor. He keeps looking at the tape. The worker pulls his pants down and proceeds to enter the bin of tuna. He makes sweet sweet love to the tuna. Finishes up, goes into the bathroom to clean off. Proceeds to smooth out the bin of tuna, wraps it back up and puts it in the fridge.

My manager immediately has me throw out the tuna and make more. Needless to say he was fired. And while this was 20 years ago I still can't eat tuna I didn't make or see made.

This thread is pretty gross, but you can put your mind at ease by going to your county health department's website and they should have a list of recent inspection reports for your favorite restaurants. Happy eating!

Not inspector but cook. One very popular local restaurant has the worst roach infestation ever. If you picked up the ticket printer and tapped it on the table you would have 40-60 baby roaches scatter. Roaches everywhere you look. They would fall from the ceiling or crawl onto the plate of food before the server could take it out. It was the most disgusting place. I quit and its still super popular and still buggy.

Worked at McDonalds. The McCafe machines were the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life. So much mold and slime and disgust. The first time I cleaned the machine, I never ordered a McCafe drink again. Just another day at McDonalds.

My Mom used to be a health inspector. A bar had a bear chained outside and the owners would bring it inside to hangout with the patrons sometimes.

Not a health inspector, but worked at a restaurant that was barely skirting by on health inspections.

We had a big roach problem, but we did a good job keeping them out of the actual food, which I guess is the big thing they look for with health inspections.

The most egregious issue, though, was the time I was making milkshakes and accidentally cut my arm on the metal counter. Well, I didn't notice how bad the cut was until I saw blood in the ice cream tub. Being a responsible person, I go to throw the ice cream out when the manager interrupts me, saying I should go use the first aid kit and they'll take care of the ice cream.

Well, I come back to the same tub of ice cream returned to the freezer, but the blood scraped out of it. *They kept using the ice cream.*

Edit: I want to clarify that they scraped the blood out before continuing to use the ice cream. They did not serve my blood to people directly.

Not the worst but never ate there after this...

First week in Canada I went into Popeyes as who doesn't like mashed potatoes. They were cleaning when I walked in and there was a guy with a pressurised hose blasting the floor and the water was spraying everywhere.

The fine mist of grim floor water could be seen coating the food waiting in the pass, the prep tables. Everywhere in that tiny space was just getting blasted with floor goop.

Former employee of a few food/drink related places...

•Rat/roach droppings in the pizza boxes.

•Fry cook dropping things and picking them back up to fry (he reasoned that the oil was hot enough to burn off anything. The oil was changed only weekly if not biweekly sometimes).

•ice cream shop where no hairnets or gloves were offered/needed, so managers hair ended up in ice cream. Also, questionably clean hands making cones.

•Slime/mold colonies (not growth, civilizations) in the ice makers and soda spouts at a whole chain of gas stations. AFAIK, I was the only one who ever cleaned those at my location alone, and whenever I babysat another store... Also, the coffee urns. Black bottoms and grinds caked on inside. If you live near em, go to Racetrak or Sheetz. Cleanest urns and spouts I've ever known.

OK so my dad was a health and hygiene officer in the air force back in the early 50s and was stationed in England. His job included inspecting kitchen and latrine facilities at bases, overseeing quarantine on troops returning home from Europe, and doing health inspections on said troops.

He and some fellow H&H officers were on leave in London and decided to have lunch at a pub that was advertising a soup and sandwich deal. They sit down to piping hot bowls of tomato soup and are talking and eating, when one of the guys says "Mmm good soup, nice and meaty."

Everyone stops talking as it sinks in that tomato soup should not have meat in it, and my dad reluctantly digs his spoon to the bottom of his bowl and comes up with several well cooked cockroaches. Being trained in such things, they stormed into the kitchen and confirmed that the place had their soup heating on a back burner uncovered and directly below a cold water pipe. The rising steam condenses on the pipe, makes it slippery and causes whatever scurry across it to fall into the soup. They yelled at the owner and reported the place, but beyond that they couldn't do much about the unexpected protein.

Health inspector here.

1. Just shut down a place due to a severe cockroach infestation.

2. Shut down a restaurant awhile back as there was a severe rodent infestation. I'm talking p*o everywhere, in the utensil bins, on the food prep surfaces, just everywhere. Owners were brushing it aside as they worked. Live mice stuck to glue traps under sinks, etc.

3. Another rodent infestation, owner just left cardboard boxes of open poison throughout the restaurant.

Although we can order a place closed, it doesn't happen that often. We try to educate first and work with operators. Having said that, sometimes a ticket or closure order is the only thing that will work.

Most places I inspect are pretty decent. A lot of what we see is lack of safe food handling procedures and hand washing (i.e. preparing raw chicken with gloves on - placing gloved hands right into the flour, tossing the chicken, touching sink taps, cooler doors, etc. with no hand washing). Also, cultural backgrounds and the way food was prepared "Back Home" does not meet standards in Canada.


FYI: We also inspect personal services (nail salons, tattoo shops, etc.), drinking water system, private septic systems and pools.

I was in the training program to be a state health inspector after I graduated from college. The majority of the inspections weren’t memorable and small stuff got written up, like temps being too low or high, not having gloves accessible, storing meat boxes on the ground, etc.

The twp inspections that I remember being horrible were both at low end Chinese places in strip malls. In one inspection, the wok chef had an overflowing ashtray right next to the meat bins. Rodent droppings, piles of flies behind the range, open doors to the outside, just nasty.

We also had to check soda machines and the hoses and guns. The soda gun line at one place was so caked with mold and funk it was a miracle that soda could even get through, we couldn’t figure out how any previous inspector had missed that or what happened. The soda gun was the worst because it ruined eating out and having a mixed drink, I’ll never be able to drink anything out of a soda gun ever again.

I got a better job offer after two months of that and ran out of that job.